Network Planning for the Future Railway Communications

Smart transportation systems are changing the way future mobility is conceived. In particular, railways are undergoing a transformation process to modernize public transportation and rail operation. Technologies like 5G, optical fiber and cloud data centers have emerged as catalysts to digitalize the railway by providing high-speed and low-latency communications. In this work, the network planning for the future communications in long-distance rail systems is presented. This work introduces two mechanisms to solve the network planning problems in the future railway communications. First, the Base Station Placement Problem (BSPP) is solved, aiming at guaranteeing the necessary cell edge throughput along the rail tracks. Second, an integer linear program formulation is used to solve the Data Center Placement and Assignment Problem (DCPAP), where data centers are placed and optimally associated to the train stations, while reducing latency and costs. The obtained results show the trade-off between the average latency, the infrastructure costs, the optimal number of data centers and their location.